while talent merely wins. "Let me know," said that fine, but unappreciated thinker, Brownlee Brown, "let me know what chances a man has passed in contempt; not what he has made, but what he has refused to make, reserving himself for higher ends."

All out-door work in winter has a cheerful look, from the triumph of caloric it implies; but I know none in which man seems to revert more to the lower modes of being than in searching for sea-clams. One may sometimes observe a dozen men employed in this way, on one of our beaches, while the northwest wind blows keenly (our coldest wind), and the spray drifts back like snow over the green and sluggish surge. The men pace in and out with the wave, going steadily to and fro like a pendulum, ankle-deep in the chilly brine, their steps quickened by hope or slackening with despair. Where the maidens and children sport and shout in summer, there in winter these heavy figures succeed. To them the lovely crest of the emerald billow is but a chariot for clams, and is valueless if it comes in empty. Really, the position of the clam is the more dignified, since he moves only with the wave, and the immortal being in fish-boots wades for him. These bivalves resemble the quahaug, and are chiefly salted down for bait. After a heavy gale, a man may sometimes gather several bushels.

The harbor and the beach are thus occupied in winter; but one may walk for many a mile along the cliffs, and see nothing human but a few gardeners, spreading green and white sea-weed as manure upon the lawns. The mercury rarely drops to zero here, and there is little snow; but a new-fallen drift has here just the same virgin beauty as farther inland, and when one suddenly comes in view of the sea beyond it, there is a sensation of summer softness. The water is not then deep blue, but pale, with opaline reflections. Vessels in the far horizon have the same delicate tint, as if woven of the same liquid material. A single wave lifts itself lan

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guidly above a reef, -a white-breasted loon floats near the shore, the sea breaks in long, indolent curves, — the distant islands swim in a vague mirage. Along the cliffs hang great organ-pipes of ice, distilling showers of drops that glitter in the noonday sun, while the barer rocks send up a perpetual steam, giving to the eye a sense of warmth, and suggesting the comforts of fire. Beneath, the low tide reveals long stretches of golden-brown sea-weed, caressed by the lapping wave.

High winds bring a different scene. Sometimes I fancy that in winter, with less visible life upon the surface of the water, and less of unseen animal life below it, there is yet more that seems like vital force in the individual particles of waves. Each separate drop appears more charged with desperate and determined life. The lines of surf run into each other more brokenly, and with less steady roll. The low sun, too, lends a weird and jagged shadow to gallop in before the crest of each advancing wave, and sometimes there is a second crest on the shoulders of the first, as if there were more than could be contained in a single curve. Greens and purples are called forth to replace the prevailing blue. Far out at sea great separate mounds of water rear themselves, as if to overlook the tossing plain. Sometimes these move onward and subside with their green still unbroken, and again they curve into detached hillocks of foam, white, multitudinous, side by side, not ridged, but moving on like a mob of white horses, neck overarching neck, breast crowded against breast.

Across those tumultuous waves I like to watch, after sunset, the revolving light; there is something about it so delicate and human. It seems to bud or bubble out of the low, dark horizon; a moment, and it is not, and then another moment, and it is. With one throb the tremulous light is born; with another throb it has reached its full size, and looks at you, coy and defiant; and almost in that instant it is utterly gone. You cannot conceive yourself to be

N Shakespeare's Cymbeline there occurs a passage suggesting a curious question, to which it has not been easy to find an answer. It is that where Guiderius and Arviragus are preparing to bury Imogen, who, in the dress of a youth, lies apparently dead. Guiderius says,

"Nay, Cadwal, we must lay his head to the east; My father hath a reason for 't." What was that reason? In the flood of annotation which has been poured over the plays of the greatest of poets, there has been no reply to this rather interesting inquiry. We have quite enough of a guidance that perplexes or misleads, of illustrations that do but darken, and emendations of what was quite straight till private hands intermeddled to crook it. There is plenty of vapid and false criticism, from one of the most learned of English bishops; from one of the most ponderous of English moralists; from one of the most shining names in classic English verse. But no critic or commentator that we know of, from "piddling Tibbald " to Coleridge the transcendental, with his cloudy pomp of professional words and neabstmetiens, has had

a syllable to bestow upon this point. Knight's Pictorial has no representation of it. Our own ingenious Mr. Hudson offers no lesson or conjecture about it. Mr. Richard Grant Whiteand he alone, so far as we know, has had his attention called to this subject - says: "What was Belarius's reason for this disposition of the body in the ground, I have been unable to discover." If we turn to the German version of the play by Schlegel and Tieck, we find that the passage is not only not explained, but entirely mistranslated. It is made to say,

"Nay, Cadwal, we must lay his face to the east"; "Nach Osten, Cadwal, muss sein Antlitz liegen"; which is certainly wide of the original by just half the circumference of the earth; for if the face is to look eastward, the head must, of course, be reclined westward. The two brothers were about to bury the brutish Cloten, whom Guiderius had just slain, at the same time with the beautiful boy whom they so tenderly lamented. And doubtless he would have had them both laid out in the same direction;-for, as he said, "Thersites' body is as good as Ajan, When either is alive";